The unpopular ads will be gone in 2018.

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If you watch any amount of videos on YouTube, you're probably accustomed to waiting five seconds before hitting that "skip ad" button. You're probably well aware of just how annoying it is when that button never appears and you're forced to sit through 30 seconds of a car commercial even though you live in New York City and don't even have a driver's license.

Well, there's good news: Google is scrapping 30-second unskippable ads on its video site, reports Campaign (via Neowin). Recognizing that they're not tremendously popular, especially among data-capped mobile users, the company is pushing shorter formats to advertisers, such as the six-second unskippable ad that it launched last year.

Unfortunately, the change won't take effect immediately; YouTube users will have to wait until 2018 for the longer ads to go away.

I'm so glad for that, the only 30 second unskippable ads I get have been for things I have no desire whatsoever to purchase, and the ad didn't change my mind. Skippable ones otoh, I've watched a few of those all the way through because they sometimes make an effort to make it interesting.

Sit through a mandatory 30 second ad? I don't think so. I hit refresh until it goes away. If it doesn't go away, I don't watch the video. I barely tolerate the mandatory 15 second ad and I will refresh the page for almost a minute before tolerating those.

Those are bad, but the ones they really need to get rid of are the pop-up overlays. Those are the ones that actually drove me to block ads in the first place. I could deal with a clip before & after, but the constant on-screen interruptions were just too much.

I wish there was some way to not see the same ad over, and over, and over, and over, and over. I've seen that stupid "Lemonade. Read the sign." ad hundreds of times. At least the "I know a good Philly cheesesteak" one finally went away.

Now can they please get rid of doubleclick-to-fullscreen-video? On OS X, I need to click on the video window in Chrome to get focus, then click again to get it to pause, except the OS thinks "oh! You're double-clicking!" and it tells the browser the user double-clicked. So instead of the video pausing, it maximizes. If I flail around, it just keeps flipping between max- and unmax- and proceeds to annoy me until I stop using Youtube.

I'm so glad for that, the only 30 second unskippable ads I get have been for things I have no desire whatsoever to purchase, and the ad didn't change my mind. Skippable ones otoh, I've watched a few of those all the way through because they sometimes make an effort to make it interesting.

Too bad it's not until 2018.

I actually watched the entirety of Gordon Ramsey's introduction to his Master Cooking Class (advertisement) twice now, just because it was a well written / good advertisement.

Same with the occasional video game video, sometimes the Ads are good enough to warrant watching and they are always more valuable if they are persuasive rather than coercive.

So when will I be able to pay to get rid of ads? And I don't mean pay $10 per month for some content I don't care about and the ability to skip ads on the one or maybe two videos I'm likely to watch in a day. I mean pay a fair amount to compensate YouTube for the ad revenue they otherwise would have received.

Until then, I'll just stick with finding an ad blocker that's one step ahead of YouTube. And when that fails, I won't watch YouTube. There are far better things I can do with my time than sit through ads.

Now can they please get rid of doubleclick-to-fullscreen-video? On OS X, I need to click on the video window in Chrome to get focus, then click again to get it to pause, except the OS thinks "oh! You're double-clicking!" and it tells the browser the user double-clicked. So instead of the video pausing, it maximizes. If I flail around, it just keeps flipping between max- and unmax- and proceeds to annoy me until I stop using Youtube.

Sit through a mandatory 30 second ad? I don't think so. I hit refresh until it goes away. If it doesn't go away, I don't watch the video. I barely tolerate the mandatory 15 second ad and I will refresh the page for almost a minute before tolerating those.

Exactly. It's like they're thinking they can harass you into buying something. Nope, has the opposite effect on me!

If you watch any amount of videos on YouTube, you're probably accustomed to waiting five seconds before hitting that "skip ad" button.

I probably spend more time on YouTube than any other site. Just love the instructional videos, you can learn pretty much anything quickly. Welding, cooking in cast iron, how to rhdoium plate gold. Seriously, almost anything you want to know is on YouTube.

That said, I see an ad maybe once a week, thanks to uBlock. It stops pretty much everything, except for the occasional unskippable ad that causes it to just display a black screen for a few seconds before I hit the refresh button and the video loads normally. Every now and then I'll pull YouTube up on a browser that's less locked down, see an ad and have a reaction like "What? When did YouTube start running ads again?" Then I remember that they never stopped and I'm just opted out.

For those of you upset that I'm taking money out of the pockets of video creators, you should really look into just how much money is there to be made from ads. It's pretty pathetic, around $1/1k views on the high end. That's why everyone has Patreon accounts now. Donate $1 once and you've supported them more than you could ever hope to by turning off your ad blocker.

And yes, I do support a number of video creators on Patreon. No, they were not $1 one time donations.

I'm not sure why the phrase, "you have to sit through" was added. I don't think I've ever bothered trying to watch any video that had an unskippable ad. If that button appears, I know I only have a short wait on mute while I do things on my other screen. If not, I'm out of there instantly. I don't have a lot of time left in life, so I'm not going to waste it on a commercial, thanks.

It's actually a choice of sorts. No video I've ever watched was worth an extra 30 seconds of my life.

The thing is, it doesn't take 30 seconds for an ad to make an impression. A good 5 or 6 seconds will get that repetitive conditioning that most advertisers are going for anyhow - all the extra time does is annoy your potential customers, so that now when they decide they have a need for the class of product or service you want to sell - not only are you the first or second brand they think of - but then they immediately remember how annoyed they are by your unskippable long-form ads.

30-second ads are a relic of the business model of broadcast and cable TV programming that wanted fixed-length advertising breaks, and wanted to maximize revenue while minimizing the number of ad buyers they had to sell to fill those breaks, so that the overhead of selling their ads to marketers didn't get too expensive and erode their profits.